You are below average. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but there it is. It’s no use denying it. Facts are facts, and the figures don’t lie.

Of course, I don’t know in what measure you are below average. I’m simply confident that there is some dimension on which you are. I myself, for example, am below average in height for adult male Americans. If I were Japanese and the same size I would be above average; among the Tutsi I imagine I would be considered a midget.

But enough about me. Let’s talk about you. In what ways are you below average? Probably not in driving. Studies have shown that around two-thirds to three-quarters of drivers rate themselves above average in driving skill and performance. They wouldn’t lie, would they? This result is sometimes cited as an instance of what is called the “Lake Woebegone Effect,” for Garrison Keillor’s mythical town where all the children are above average.

But in fact, it might possibly be the case that three-quarters of all drivers are above average. To see how this might be, suppose we could assign a single number from 1 to 10 to each driver according to skill. Then suppose, for simplicity, that there are only four drivers in our population, and that they score 10, 10, 10, and 2. The average score is 8, and three of the four drivers rate better than that. We might conceivably be a nation of pretty good drivers, with a small minority of really, really bad ones who pull the average down and, by the way, are forever in front of us on the highway. It might be so, but it probably isn’t.

So it’s not necessarily the case that, for any measure, half of the population will be above average and half below. That datum is called the median. But for a measure that varies more or less as, say, height or intelligence do – more technically, that vary as a normal distribution – and with a suffciently large population, we can estimate that roughly half will score above and half below the average. This means that for any such measure, we could walk down the street and pick out any random person and the chances would be about 50-50 that he or she would be below average. That person could very easily be you.

Naturally, you are above average in intelligence. The fact that you are visiting the Britannica Blog is sufficient evidence of that, even if some of the comments to be found here point towards a different conclusion.

The lesson is that, on average, the average tells us rather less than we tend to credit to it. It is useful to recall the ancient jest about the old fellow sitting with one foot in the fire and one in the icebox: On average, he is comfortable.

Once we get beyond the average and the median, most of us get lost in statistics. It is a form of mathematics for which the brain was not designed. (If there were an Intelligent Designer, things would be otherwise, of course.) But the fact that we can’t follow it or don’t like the results it yields gives us no warrant to mock it or to pretend that its results are bogus. Especially not when it tells us that there’s a good chance we are below average.